Flooding NYC’s subways with police cost millions — and didn’t fix anything (Marisa Kabas, 12/28/23, MSNBC)
If you’d like to visit a New York City public library on a Sunday, you’re out of luck, thanks to recent city budget cuts. But if you’d like to see a subway station crawling with cops (including the PR-friendly robot variety), the possibilities are bountiful. This is life in Eric Adams’ New York.In 2022, amid concerns about rising crime in the city’s transit system, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams took the idea of “defund the police” and flipped it on its head. They dreamed up a strategy of “the three Cs” — “Cops, Cameras, Care” — which Hochul announced in October last year. What if, they imagined, we added more than a thousand uniformed police officers to patrol the subway every day and paid them much more — millions more? Now, one year later, city records show it led to a $151 million increase in NYPD overtime pay, a negligible decrease in crime and a vast increase in fare evasion tickets and arrests of people of color.